This invention relates to pressed curd opened-body cheeses.
Cooked or non-cooked pressed curd cheeses are not opened in body when their dimensions are average; in the case of wheels, for example, their diameter does not exceed 350 mm and their height 150 mm while their weight is no more than about 10 kg. Saint-Paulin, Gouda, Edam and Cantal are mentioned as examples.
Pressed curd cheeses which have undergone regular and developed opening of the body, of the Emmental type, are commercially available, but only in the form of large wheels from 700 to 1000 mm in diameter and from 130 to 250 mm in height and weighing from about 60 to 130 kg. In the case of Emmental, the body is opened by regularly developed propionic fermentation, that is, the propionic bacteria form propionic acid and acetic acid and also carbon dioxide which dissolves in the water of the body to saturation and, when saturation is reached, gas bubbles appear at certain places, producing holes in the body. The propionic fermentation takes place above all by anaerobiosis and away from the crust.
It would be desirable to make available to consumers a pressed curd cheese of average to small dimensions which has organoleptic and body opening characteristics similar to those of Emmental, i.e., a "mini-Emmental". It is easy to see the advantages such a cheese would have in terms of production and distribution costs apart from the attraction of the novelty.
Efforts to achieve this end have been made in various directions:
Technological modifications relating to the pasteurization conditions of the milk, the quantity of rennet used, the extent of lactose removal and the pressing temperature have failed to remedy the lack of openings or holes in the body of the cheese.
Microbiological modifications such as increasing the quantities and the selectivity of the propionic bacteria or the use of other micro-organisms, such as yeasts, for example, have been equally unsuccessful.
Finally, coating the cheeses over 90% of their surface with a thermoformed film of plastics material to keep in the gases, a plug of wax covering the remaining 10% to act as a valve in the event of an increase in volume, only produced cheeses of which the body was opened, but which were completely deformed after ripening for 25 days.